process i think, i think coming here with kids is trying to find to be off the 5 on. and even though it's like, easy to see the what an impressive young woman you can find that more on that story and everything else that we have been covering on our website. there it is. and the address, of course, al jazeera dot com ah, a reminder. now the top stories on al jazeera, us secretary of state anthony, blinking has warned, of a swift and severe response from america and its allies in russia sends any military forces into ukraine. the ukrainian army has been holding military drills while around the 100. 100000 russian troops are thought to have gathered around ukraine's borders, sparking fears of an invasion. lincoln will hold talks with russia foreign minister

in geneva, on friday, in an effort to de escalate the tensions. but the kremlin denies is preparing for an attack and is accused the west of staging a cover for its own provocations. us president joe biden, meanwhile, has warned that russia will pay a heavy price if it invades ukraine. after being criticized for suggesting that allies would be split over what he called a minor incursion. i've been actually clear with president is no misunderstanding if any, any assemble rushing units, blue cross creating where that is an invasion. but then we met with severe and coordinated economic response that i've discussed in detail with our allies as well as laid out very clearly for president. but there is no doubt, but to be no down at all. that makes this choice. russian k a heavy price. the 1st shipments of international aid have arrived in tongue of 5 days after

a devastating volcanic eruption and soon ami ashes blanket had the country's islands and spoiled much of its drinking water. this an army killed at least 3 people and knocked out. most communications. phone lines are now being slowly restored, but the internet isn't expected to fully come back on line 4 weeks. a huge explosion has destroyed at least 500 buildings in ghana with fears of many casualties. a local official says he saw at least 10 dead bodies. please say a truck carrying explosives to a gold mine in the west of the country collided with a motorcycle. people are being advised to evacuate the area with nearby towns, opening up rescue centers in churches and in schools where those are the top stories that stay with us coming up next the, it's the stream and i'm going to have more news for you in just under half an hour, thanks for watching. bye bye. ah

ah! i am from the okay. last saturday, an underwater volcano erupted off the coastline of tongue. it blasted ash and stone into the air and also was followed by us and nami. how all the residence of tone, good doing? his wayne high with the latest tonya was cut off from the rest of the world when the disaster struck a submarine fiber optic cable was severed. and we'll take at least 4 weeks to repair. in the meantime, some satellite phone and internet connections have been set up, allowing more footage to emerge of the devastation caused by the volcano and soon

army. for some family in new zealand. the slight improvement and communication has come as a relief, even though everything. parts of the houses washed away the crops, but we hear that our family and offerings are well at the moment and com. okay, at the moment, but what about in the future? joining the stream to talk about the impact volcano on tonya louise, shane and katie. i'm going to get them to introduce yourself themselves to you international audience at louis. so good to have. okay. on the still, how have you as you are, and what you do is i'm the waste water has i'm the owner a consul general for the kingdom of tongue or in australia. and i've been in my role in a voluntary capacity for about 25 years or more. and so we've,

we've had exposure to this volcano, going back to 1988 coming and going, but never been at this level. vital, extraordinary situation. we find ourselves in at the moment. oh, glad to happen here on today. shallow shang, you're very welcome. please introduce yourself to have you as my lawyer lay, i'm my name is sasha cronan. i'm a vulcan ologist. i work at the university of oakland in new zealand. i've spent a long time working on tongan volcanoes and i'm working with a large team of international and new zealand woken ologist trying to understand this ongoing situation. and so donaldson. hello, katie, welcome to the string. telephone is who you are and what day. hi everyone. i'm katie greenwood, i'm the head of delegation for international federation of red cross and red prison here in the pacific. and i work with all of our different red cross organizations right across the pacific, including the red cross. i've been working in and around the pacific for the last

15 years or so. absolutely love it and place to serve with these people. all right, so we have title, shane, and the weeds and you, if you want you to and you can ask questions. they have so much expertise to share with you and experience. the comment section is right here. join it and be part of today's show. i am wondering louise and shane. what it looks like in tom the today louise, you start. it looks like a moon scale. we went from one moment of green, luscious, cough coconut, for a station to just to landscape grey ash everywhere. and i mean absolutely everywhere the aerial photos is just everything looks black and gray evenly, airport was closed for 3 days and needed 100 people, including volunteers, to sleep at clear. and you can just imagine black suit being covering everything. you have all the islands of toner, just covered in sort. shane,

we're looking at some up some picture i don't want to. i don't want to sort of, i don't play how serious and, and terrible the situation is. you know, for the beautiful country of tonga, but i was very relieved when i did see these images because there is definite impact. and obviously the tsunami and the ash impact has been, has been massive, but i was so much i x, i feared, actually worse, given the explosive the of the event. and i feared they could have been even 10 to 20 centimeters of asheville, for example. and it seems in that you seen to me to range so you know, this is an immediate issue, but i believe that the recovery will be swift. let's talk about recovery. one italian effort. i'm going to bring in quinn ada clack from the humanitarian network council for international development. i'm going to play how comment that she sent us a little bit earlier, casey and i respond directly off the back of it. he's with this is

a really hot and challenging emergency in china and we, patchy and limited communications. we're really struggling to make contact with that is on the ground. but what we're hearing from the government is that also and few is critical. and the time government is also desperately trying to take her out of the country. so the best thing people can do right now is what you zealand agencies through cash donations. and that money will get to the communities on the ground for delivering back critical. and we know this will be a terrible process for many used to come with significant ongoing impacts to the communities of china. many a lot has been said there and it's absolutely right. everything in that, that compensation right from the challenges that we face as an international humanitarian community in responding have been a little bit unprecedented,

particularly in the 72 hours of this disaster. when we couldn't get in touch with people on the ground at all. and we just had to trust that all the preparedness and the training and the response and the pre position related supplies that we had on there, on the ground. i was going to do the job the end. you know, i think that a number of things have been said, the challenge is also the overlay of coded. we do not want to be swapping one disaster for another at this particular point in time. and so the kingdom of homer is absolutely brought to have some of the protocols that they've got in place there around the response. the other thing that was mentioned is the sort of the time range on, on recovery day. so we know that in disasters we bought sure and medium and long term kind of response windows. and they're all critically important. but they all look slightly different from each other. it was, can you explain the water challenges for tongue because i believe there are no rivers in tongue. so when there is

a synonymy or nitrogen off the like the one tongue is experiencing right now, how much water is that? well, that's the problem we have. so most of the water is either ball water or 3 water tanks and it was water tanks have been polluted with the air. yes, coming through the air. so it's just an absolute disaster. we're trying to get water supplies in and already yesterday, new zealand and australia sent over emergency water. but we're also looking to try and find some water purification at the thing is that see me, it's not just the water, it's the air quality. you can imagine the breathing of this ash in the end. fortunately, who sent it a container of mass 250000, which were not needed for coven. but maybe now they're coming in handy. the other thing which is this disaster is the entire crop. the whole crop has been destroyed by the ash coverage to come over the island. so you can imagine we had this immediate disaster of what drinking water is brief, but also the ongoing disaster of food. we were just really worried about what's

going to happen for time going forward. send me a wine and others. sorry, i think shane and others have got really good information to people on the water situation and then how would it can be treated a bad time. so lately and in that water supply situation, and we seen from the pictures of that not only on the roofs damage, but also many of the tanks damaged. so if the, if there are water tanks that are being preserved and you know, they're, they're ex, can disconnected from the roofs, that water will still be safe to drink. and the boil water will still be safe to drink as well. but it obviously needs power to extract that. and because the ash, when it falls, it will cover plants and, and cause lots of damage to the green leafy parts of plants. it is not poisonous

and of itself. so root crops will still be fine to eat. tyro yams, comalla, other types of root crops, cassava they will still be fine to eat. and obviously the leafy crops will be impossible. the, the water in of itself, again, is also not. there's not poisonous, there's not heavy meters via it's salts, it's it's acidity. so under the worst case scenario, you can drink that water. it may cause stomach upsets for children and people with sensitive stomachs. but i just want to emphasize that people should not be discarding water. if there is a fear, your taste, the water will be metallic tasting. and that will be an indicator that there's a bit of acidity in there, but it is not an inherently dangerous. and i just wanted to make sure that people weren't necessarily discounting water and we've had some reports of that in other parts of the percent last we had that is so good to know shame because that's one of the things it's been stressing out in the community thinking that the,

the water would be not only polluted to poisonous, so that such of a thank you very sharing that there have been some indications that the volcano may arise because i've been shocked. i wasn't thinking since about november so that those, those, yeah, that's right. i mean, the cases that come to had to be ready to get ready. 202020 hindsight to great thing. and so we are, we're seeing now all of the signs that that lead up to this large levine. so we were seeing, obviously i will, last decades, there has been activity, but we were also seeing uplift of the central part of that volcano over the last 5 years. and in terms of corals being uplifted and things like that. and we also saw an early evidence of this sudden eruptions 30th of december and the 13th of january. so these were short lived explosive events,

and they were telling us that gas was building up and the volcano the pressure was rising. we bet we couldn't really tell from a day to day our process when that was going to actually happen though, because there is no monitoring on site. it brings us back to the point with around the communications. the infrastructure is so poor in many of the south pacific countries, and there is little support internationally to try and bring over laying layers of infrastructure. we're talking communications obviously, but also in terms of hazard warning, we have so little information to go on because there are no working seismometer nearby and the, the team on the ground. i mean there's fantastic geology team in tonga, tonya, tonya, ella kula and his team at the geological services they've been having to go out on boat to watch the activity of, of the russian as it is, it happens which is really, really dangerous for them. it's also very difficult because you're reacting to

a situation rather than trying to forecast it. so we've been trying to help tanya and his team using as much knowledge retain and obviously international communities being pouring in here we, we've had people from the usa and either u. k and all over the world that are pouring the knowledge into helping this through through the year through the m. m. as got some question. i got some questions cuz i would it's very curious. so let me, let me share this one with you. katie. first of all, this one is on twitter and the tweet in response to our program subject. today, everyone seems to, to depend on cables and satellite. how about some good old ham, radio. lam must in such remote places. i mean, part of the ang, anxiety of the tongan diaspora is they don't know what happened to their family and their friends would radio katie would that make a difference? it already has made a difference in the initial hours of this response. so i saw that

a sort of tweet like that earlier in the way can completely agree that we need some low tech, low expense. and you know, fixes in in the mix in all of these places. so we did use a chip radio in the early hours. certainly that was used within toner itself. when all communications went down. so like everything you need a mix high tech solutions a fantastic and when shine was talking then i was really reminded of the old adage of building back better. and as we do build back in talk after this disaster, i think, you know, we in red cross, we'll be thinking about things like, do we need to face that on our building for red cross, because that's the, in the days after this, that's the only way that disaster cooperation has been able to happen, and that's been shared really well by people who have u. s. the, the asian development bank and others, you know,

are really helping out with that. but do we need that? do we need, you know, more radio technology. so that if these things happen and you know, people can communicate with each other, i think the, the high tech solutions are fantastic. but we also need some low cost low tech to be able to scale up our responses really quickly on the ground. i'm going to put another question milano teaching. absolutely. yeah. that the residence of multiple technologies is i think the resilience of multi technologies certainly important as case of i have so many questions for you. i'm just going to, i'm going to pack them with you because they, what is a really came to, to find out more. this one louise is from she vance. this is a clear example. what happened to tom that as a necessity of disaster preparedness and for other states, king you were practicing you were getting prepared. was it enough, louise? i don't think it's ever enough that yes,

we're right. i think we said we saved lives with all the preparedness for pacin army in the synonymy warnings and drills that have been going on in honor over the last few years. have been definitely a great help. but yes, you never prepared enough, but what i wanted to say also is when we talk about connectivity and technology that the cable that connects tanya to the outside world. that means to the southern cross cable that goes from australia via e g to the states that ran actually right along side disco chemo. so it couldn't have been in a worse position. so when we had the eruption, then of course the 1st thing to break was the, was the cable in. and it broke in 2 cats, one beside the volcano and the other. another area because it was sitting on a coral reef and close the coral cut through the cable. and the problem we have now is to repair this cable. it's going to take 34 weeks because we have to bring a boat from, from popcorn, new guinea and, and obviously accessing difficult condition. so that's why we, we need to come back to simple technology and,

and be able to go back to the old days when we could, you know, call without having a satellite or without having a cable. and i think it was a good point about the ham radio. i me also the disaster preparedness angle that you're talking about is absolutely critical. and i think shine said at the beginning that he was almost pleasantly surprised that the effects of the volcano in synonymy were not as catastrophic as we 1st thought that they might be when we were watching from a fire. and i definitely, you know, we have definitely had that feeling as well. we expected mass casualties. we expected absolute devastation. and, you know, to, to not have that, that as a result of people knowing what to do, being well informed, having well coordinated people on the ground who had supported evacuations and the like in end that, you know, we've had pre prepared stocks ready to the 1200 families on the ground,

ready to go immediately with the things that people made that that preparedness just cannot be underestimated. that's so much about how true matri. yeah, yeah. a cultural memory of disaster events around around toner, in the pacific and, and so people, you know, really respond well to natural signs. for example, when the water goes out before, as to now me hearing booms and feeling earthquakes. and so people are very naturally resilient, but the incredible way fits of ongoing if it's of organizations like like the red cross and like the south pacific community. and so wanting to keep bringing these messages through to the modern day is very important. i'm going to show the same by painters. i'm going to move on to a little bit and we didn't come right back to you i want to bring in has handled because there's a lot of fascination and curiosity about volcanoes, this underwater volcano. this is what have told us a little bit earlier. what made this particular option difficult to categorize,

was it usually when we assign a size or a magnitude to interruption? we use 2 main factors. these are how high that the plume goes into the atmosphere, but also the amount of material, the volume of material that's been rejected. and what was quite unusual about this erosion is that it was an extremely powerful eruption that produced ashan gas that reached at least 30 kilometers into the atmosphere in current estimates suggest even as high as 39 kilometers high. but despite i actually, it was a very short duration interruption and it didn't produce a lot of material that we want to expect from a magnitude eruption of that power and explosive nature. so shane has what she was saying earlier. the devastation was not as bad as he was expecting it to be. katie, you heard the volcano and you were where? oh, i'm in fiji, which is 7 or 800 kilometers away from toner. and yes,

we on saturday afternoon heard this light booming sound almost like cannon shot. so loud thunder, no clouds in the sky, no reason. our windows and doors also shook for about half an hour. and i just couldn't understand what it was. we actually thought there was a quite happening here fiji and then all the alerts started to come through. so. ready i can't imagine what the sound must have been like for people in toner. louis, what is it like when you see that footage? we're looking at the interruption right now. you know, it's uh, the coastline of tonga is that you're picking up nightmare. of course it is excellent nightmare. and the curious thing about this is with knowing about is under water volcano and it's been popping up and popping down and, and i'm in the back in 1988. then king sent a boat out with a flag to claim this new island photography. so we all laughed and said, now we have not $172.00 islands, but we have a $173.00. so it's been a bit of

a curiosity. we've never, ever thought it was going to be said, angel is this. and now of course we know that this volcano is a 1000 years cycle. that means that the last time that erupt, this magnitude was in, in 105080. and we now know that it was actually due to erupt. it's about now one decade or so. so it's, it's extraordinary, it's been under our nose isn't coming and going over the last 6 years. and we've just thought of it as a curiosity shine, excuse me for asking you as a professor to do a speed round on volcanoes, but i know you're out. yeah, i've got so many questions here for you. all right, so james reedy, what is the common activity? yeah, good question. and i was about to say one of the most important things that we as a community invoke and all of just trying to understand now is what's gonna happen next. so we've had out by government and what are they going to be more options? and that's the most important question we're focusing on. yeah, sorry. currently the new zealand, well kind of science advisory group,

or with all universities across the country, plus gini science. where coordinating all of our knowledge and equipment, we have people and equipment standing by. as soon as we get our samples from tonga, will be able to start assessing with a new magma was involved in this rupture to trigger it. or whether it was triggered by style, old mag move, it's been sitting there and just expanding. imagine like a loaf of bread inside the top of the volcano, as it sits there, it expands and puts pressure on the volcano and causes the, you know, extremely violent eruption that we, i mean, i not only the magma but also the interaction of bank magnor and water gave it that huge power. what we want to know urgently is it is then you magma that has caused that. because if we can see the signs of that and we know how to recognize that we've got specialized instruments at the university of oakland to look at that. or we will then be on alert for an ongoing larger eruptions. we know from the

geological record that some of these events occur with up to 10 or 12 different major ruptured phases. you could probably say we've had say 3 or larger phases so far. so we could be at the beginning of a longer story and that's what we really want to know. i say i'm actually class for 2 more questions because i really want the order to have you have your expertise, but you have to answer them in a sentence professor. all right, i had the volcano is under the ocean. does that help prevent worse damage? worse in no the other way around. it was under a 1000 meters or more of water. it was damp in it. it was the perfect amount of water to mix efficiently. you lash water to steam and it blows up jonathan on ye, cheapness and christ, church new zealand. he says, is a lot of activities. linens. should they be right about a rupture anytime soon? there are these volcanoes, they're all on the same. take tonic structure, but they operate on their own time scale. they have their own magnet plumbing

systems. so they're separate from each other. one more cheeky question from j. gina, i admire, i, my, you're, what's the here saying is a vulcan, a vulcan ologist. why didn't he predict the, our rupture? yeah, i can certainly predict the eruption on a geological scale, but we wave alarms in the distance and say, hey, it could be in the next sort of teen to a 100 years. the problem is on a daily scale, we need monitoring equipment, and we also need a lot more experience of understanding this particular volcano. it's a pretty tough science to coal on a di da di you are now to our basis my dentist. i would keep p for the whole week to do a show, shane and katie, eloise, there's so much to talk about, but i really appreciate how much you've told us about the aftermath of the tongue of volcano. what needs to happen. i'm going to leave the final words if they show with joseph sic, hulu. he's a pacific director of $350.00, or that's watching. i see next time between that has already begun

in tones like island is all over the pacific under strangest natural disasters. in the resilience of our people against the escalating climate crush, this means that our people are already equipped to recover from this disaster to the ropes. recovery will be a long one and over the next few days will begin to fully understand the effect. the ass from the reception is how do i want assistance in agriculture, rollins? as a recovery, begins impala. the rest of the songs around the world immobilized organize all the support and resources. we can break her, we will rebuild and recover. this is what we have always done. ah

ah february on i'll just either china host the winter olympics, but we'll diplomatic boycott and the corona virus overshadow the events. rigorous debate them unflinching questions. up front cuts through the headlights to challenge conventional wisdom. al jazeera keeps you up to date with mation, tackle the over cranberry, amid continued vaccine inequality. 11 east investigates how breakfast the pandemic

and changing pace are causing the great british curry crisis. the african union hope it's 30 beth ordinary session. a 1st with israel as an observer state, with several nations campaigning against israel status and pressing issues across the continent. there is much to disgust february on a jazeera, extraordinary men and women who are breaking the mold from the taxi drivers, investing everything they have in to their mini bus. only to face extreme danger on the suitors. roughest tracks to the jokey, turned paramedics saving lives, transporting the sick and elderly for medical help. blue to risking it's all on al jazeera. oh, from the al jazeera london, pul casenita to special guest in conversation. when you say a lie, a 1000000 times, it becomes

a fact. you then can create whatever narrative you want on prompted uninterrupted. and i realized i was working for something i was evil, you know, being a part of actually creating maria, theresa, miss christopher wiley. the death of journalism is only the 1st signal for the death of democracy studio. be unscripted on al jazeera. ah, hello, i'm barbara. so in london, these are the top stories on al jazeera. u. s. president joe biden says any movement of russian troops and to ukraine will be considered an invasion by then stop. diplomat has been in germany showing up support from european allies who have pledged the swift and severe response to any russian aggression new satellite images show. moscow is increasing its troops build up near the ukrainian border, but the kremlin denies its preparing for an attack. dominic came reports from berlin, ukrainian soldier.